What will make you strong? What will take your strength away?
What motifs will you place in the foreground?
Shall you presume not to employ what others do
and make no display of sorrow during mourning?
How will you know which to seek first, which last?
Which of them should be taken and placed somewhere else?
How much scrutiny should you devote to yourself,
how much to the spirits and things which have
guided you here, cognate with you and each other
beyond, well beyond the question of influence?
These are the smaller questions we think of,
place before the Altar of the Greater Remove,
above which the unrolled banner reads as follows:
All that’s removed is removed to the world
and the world, finally, is removed to itself.
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